Endangered Species Of Tech

Just like animals, technology has the possibility of eventually becoming endangered or even extinct. There are many things you can already assume are extinct, for example, care phones, those just don’t exist anymore because we have cellphones. Telegrams have gone a similar way. We don’t use hydrogen blimps anymore either, for a particularly obvious reason that rhymes with Shmindenberg Shmexplosion. But what is the next round of endangered technology, that is starting to fall by the wayside, cannibalized by new and better tech.

Here are my educated guesses…

1. DVD/Blu-ray: Just like Betamax and later VHS, DVD’s are almost completely extinct. While DVD players were once very expensive, now they are given out like McDonald’s Happy meal toys (just $33). Soon Blu-ray will follow suit once more televisions and streaming platforms begin to support 4K streaming. That is the final horizon for all packaged media, because once you can stream top quality film via internet, why waste not only the resources to make Blu-ray players and disks, but space it takes to house them.
2. Cameras: Of course I don’t mean DSLR cameras like the ones produced by Canon, Sony, and Fujifilm… Those are important pieces of equipment for artists to create art, I’m talking about those point and shoot cameras we all used to own… and care about what megapixel it had. Your phone can shoot 4K video now, who cares about megapixel?. Also, who is even printing photos anymore? For what? If it’s not extinct already, it’s close.
3. Laptop Computers: I know… I know… you might think I’m crazy, but although we might be a bit further away from this one than the other two, it’s not far. Tablets are as powerful if not more powerful than laptops at this point. Considering how it is less and less necessary to connect your laptop to external devices since most of everything is saved and located on cloud servers, a laptop is nothing more than a table with a built-in keyboard. As the chips and processors get smaller and smaller, the need for a full laptop becomes less and less. Tablets with Bluetooth keyboards will be the next laptop, and desktops will pretty much be just for people who are handling very heavy processes like editing, designing, and coding.
4. WiFi Hotspots: I add this to the list very tentatively. As we begin to transition into 5G cellular internet data, we will see a lot of changes to how we use the internet. I believe that hotspots will become less and less necessary when all of our devices use the internet anyway and can catch it from the cellular networks. We are already seeing a blending of internet service providers with cellular plans and I think that blend will become more and more blurry until the internet is just a ubiquitous thing that doesn’t have to be accessed from different types of connections but is just a necessity for everything to function.

In the end, we never know what will truly happen, and it is always possible that a company may come out with a redesign of any one of these pieces of technology to breathe life back into the hardware. Polaroid cameras are coming back (cute!), so who knows what that leads to. Maybe DVD’s and Blu-ray will offer content we can’t get elsewhere, and with VR as a next platform, who knows what that even looks like. All we know is that this world evolves quickly, and technology comes and goes at the drop of a hat!